firehose

Are Naval Ships the New 'Black Site' Prisons?:

The CIA no longer has any “black site” prisons where they used to carry out “enhanced” interrogations far away from the soil (and civil rights laws) of U.S. prisons. What about a naval vessel floating international waters?

The television show The Unit explored this several years back.

There’s a very cynical piece of me that holds if this kind of this is being reported on in The Atlantic, it’s no longer being practiced. Meaning, we’ve moved on to something else.

An anonymous reader writes "Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's novel 1984, resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover in a failed attempt to escape the government's ubiquitous surveillance. Orwell was concerned with totalitarianism and explicit thought control enforced by police action. While that is still very much an issue for many of the world's residents, here in the West there is an unsettling feeling about a more subtle form of thought manipulation, as more and more of our activities are watched, cataloged, and analyzed by more and more institutions — governments, businesses, non-profits, political parties, mostly for predictive purposes. At least we have a name for it now: 'Dataland', a term suggested by Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research, who studies the sociological effects of networking technologies. Crawford has been written up in Slashdot before. She's criticized the indiscriminate adoption of Big Data analytics on several grounds, including the loss of anonymity, erroneous conclusions from skewed datasets, and the prospect of secret discrimination."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Men working on Baltimore City Hall | Via

Way to thank our troops for their service, America! ⊟

Umbramagius posted this (saw it via GoNintendo), which purportedly was shot in a military exchange. Just reopen the dang government already so these guys and girls can get back to catching some mons.

PREORDER Pokemon X and Y, official strategy guide, upcoming games

Shut the front door!

Confess, Banksy in NY

Good Morning! And would you like some delicious schadenfreude with your breakfast? The prominent Tea Party fundraising group FreedomWorks has pretty much exactly no money! Why? Because no one has been giving them any.

tastefullyoffensive:

How not to get hired at Cadbury. [via]

WPTV

'MasterChef' finalist Josh Marks found dead Entertainment Weekly MasterChef finalist Josh Marks, 26, was found dead on Friday night by Chicago police, People confirms. Authorities discovered Marks along South Peoria Avenue with a bullet wound to the head; the wound was apparently self-inflicted. A relative on the scene ... 'MasterChef' finalist Josh Marks, 26, found dead in apparent suicideKansas.com 'MasterChef' finalist Josh Marks reportedly dies, suicide suspectedLos Angeles Times Today's News: Our Take - Report: MasterChef's Josh Marks Found Dead at 26MPNnow.com all 47 news articles »

This week's spooky Concept Art Writing Prompt takes us into space, where a planet is ringed by thousands of dismembered skeletons. What stories take place in this planetary graveyard?

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“The Ice Warriors” (season 5, episodes 11-17. Originally broadcast Nov. 11-Dec. 16, 1967.)

It’s a nice coincidence that we’re looking at “The Ice Warriors” this time out, considering the news that nine lost Doctor Who episodes from the same era have been found—in fact, they’re all from the two stories directly following this one, “The Enemy Of The World” and “The Web Of Fear.” (And yes, I hope to review both soon.) The second and third episodes of “The Ice Warriors” are among the 97 still missing—the other four parts were recovered in 1988—but they’ve been recreated with animation on the recently released DVD.

“The Ice Warriors” comes from the middle of Doctor Who’s great age of monsters, the three seasons starring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. I'm a little ambivalent about the era as a whole, to be honest ...

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vimeo:

CONSTELLACTION by ◥ panGenerator

Here’s a magical installation piece from Polish art collective panGenerator.

cauda-pavonis:

samwinchesterror:

petticoatruler:

phoenix-falls:

cminorchord:

The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) || The Mysterious Stranger Scene

I’m only giving you guys this link if you PROMISE not to watch it when you’re high. Just trust me on that 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USZGm9GR7ak

I’m sober and that fucked me up

Watched this when I was still in school and I think it traumatized our classroom omfg.

for jasminekor

I made a noise that could have shattered glass when I found this in the bargain DVDs bin. I love the crap out of this movie.

Courtney shared this story from this cage is worms.

---

MC: I remember when I first saw `Fire Walk With Me’, at the Cannes film festival, there were loud boos – how does the apparent failure of a film like this affect you?

DL: `Dune’ was a failure to me, because I didn’t feel I did, you know, the `Dune’ I should have done. This was not a failure to me, because I felt it was a film that I did the way I should have done it. And so we learn that we can’t control anything that happens after a film is finished, and sometimes things go well in the world, and sometimes they don’t. But if you believe in the film, and you’ve done your best, they can’t take that away from you. There’s this thing – there’s the doughnut, and there’s the hole, and we should keep our eye on the doughnut and not on the hole. Everything that happens after a film is finished is maybe interesting and it can be, you know, very hurtful, or exhilarating in certain ways, but it has not much to do with the work. And so I would like to go back to work as quickly as I can or do, you know, painting or work on music. And be separate, you know, from those things I can’t control.

thanks to this website for transcribing this whole interview

Filed under: Quote Time Tagged: criticism, david lynch, failure

An interesting open-source project pointed out to Phoronix this week was an OpenRISC emulator that's written in JavaScript. Making things more interesting is that it can now even run Wayland and a Linux image with keyboard support while being able to use JavaScript and other common open-source programs from this JavaScript-based emulator that runs in modern browsers...

It would seem, in the days of GPS, that the common paper road map is obsolete, but it has not outlived its usefulness to us as a nation. A look at an icon of the American Century, in transition.

"The world’s largest masturbatory action to end gentrification...an ocean of male semen could help wash away the sin of gentrification once and for all."

Although CBS didn't pick up Gregory Thomas Garcia's comedy series Super Clyde, starring Rupert Grint and Stephen Fry, the network has posted the pilot online, giving us a look at a very different brand of superhero.

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by @juan_domenech

A New Mexico school district has at least temporarily removed Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere from its lone high school following an objection to the fantasy novel’s “inappropriate” content.” The book has been part of the 10th-grade English curriculum in 2004. The Alamogordo Daily News reports that Nancy Wilmott, whose daughter was reading the novel as part [...]

sonjabarbaric: Panopticon Atom  - (Image taken in one continuous 93.8 second exposure)

Permission to be nerds here? Hell with it, I'm giving myself permission.

I made I WANT TO BELIEVE because I still really, really love RSS no matter how many people say it's dead. You will want to grab this one quickly, as I don't think I'm printing any more.

Also! A bonus shirt today, from Warren Ellis and Ariana.

It's almost Goth Xmas! Are there BLOOD WORMS in your stockings yet??

I am totally amazed at how well that went! Thingiverse skull -> CamBam -> Mach 3 -> foam part.

Celebrities are no strangers to video games, but they usually voice a relevant protagonist whichever game they’ve signed on for. Aisha Tyler (Archer, Whose Line is it Anyway?) is playing herself as a minor character in Ubisoft’s upcoming open world techno-thriller Watch Dogs. We caught up with Tyler and asked her about the part, what it’s like hosting Ubisoft’s press conference every year, and why gamers don’t respect each other.

How did you get involved in Watch Dogs?
I had a good relationship with Ubisoft after I did the press conference last year, and we were super excited to do more stuff together. Watch Dogs was a big reveal. People lost their s***. I don’t know if you remember that, but they were saying that they had never seen a reaction like that at E3 before. I think we might have gotten an ovation, and gaming people don’t ever stand up for anything. I was super excited about that game, and was raving about it and then they just called and said, “Hey do you want to be in the game?” I haven’t seen myself in the game yet either.

Really?
Which is kind of fun.

How you interact with the main character?
I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I laid down so much dialogue that I don’t know how I interact with the character. I don’t know how I drive the story forward. I feel I’m a robust NPC, but I couldn’t I tell you how my character drives the story forward. Because there’s also, in relation to dialogue, you can hack everybody, and you’re learning information about them that’s not verbal. So you could learn a bunch of stuff about my character inside the game that could help drive either the side quest or the main campaign forward, but I don’t know what that stuff is yet. So I can’t tell you. I want to tell you, but I can’t.

Yeah. So you mentioned you had some notes on your character. What influence did you have on the character?
This is the third game I’ve been in, and I’m also familiar with voice work. When I went in for Halo: Reach, they were like, “So, Halo is about-“ I was like, “Stop talking. I’ve played so many hundreds of hours of video games, I know exactly what you guys want and I also know what you need. You have to die thirty ways, and fall off a cliff thirty ways, and get smashed by a tank thirty ways." So I knew what was necessary going in. Beyond that, since this is a game about hacking where you can listen in on other people’s conversations, I ad libbed a lot. I wanted it to be things I would actually say, because I am playing myself in this game. So it’s like, “This isn’t how I would say it. I would say it like this,” or I’d add these words, or I’d subtract these words.

If you actually ended up in a Big Brother-like government conspiracy, this is how you’re actually going to behave.
Yes. Exactly, exactly. I’ve contemplated that possibility many, many times by the way. Alien wars and zombie apocalypses. I’ve thought through every gaming scenario in real life. A variety of post-apocalyptic scenarios have run through my mind. I know how I’d behave in all of them. Life doesn’t accommodate the kind of gaming lifestyle where I could play every day, not anymore. But I’ll literally go somewhere in real life and be like “Man this looks like Fallout 3.” And someone else will be like, “Oh you mean the DC subway, you idiot?” That’s how I think about the world. Only gamers talk that way.

Constantly relating the real world to games?
Right. If I’ve never been to a desert then my only reference for desert is this video game. When I play Rainbow Six Vegas, it’s like “Oh this looks like this casino I've been in.” Having those kinds of game relations makes them more real.

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How did you first get involved with Ubisoft to do their 2012 E3 press conference?
They just called. It’s the easiest job ever, and it was fun. It’s so funny because during the live stream someone was like, “You look like you were really excited to see that.” I was like, “I was!” Because all this stuff was a secret even to me. Even during rehearsal, I didn’t get to see all the playback. So during the show, when someone else was presenting, I was lying down on the stage trying to see the demo. I was like, “What are they doing?! What’s happening!?” Because I love that stuff.

There were no TVs in the back?
Little s***ty ones. I want to see the big screen.

Did you get positive feedback about how you hosted the show?
Yeah, you know, the Internet’s full of haters. For the most part, people are really enthusiastic. But, I got a lot of s*** first year.

People saying, “You’re not really a gamer”?
Yeah. For me, I didn’t care if people said they didn’t think I was funny, I didn’t care if people said they thought I was ugly or stupid. I just hated people who were saying I didn’t play games. I just didn’t like that people were doubting my gamer credibility. It’s like essentially telling you, “You don’t love something.” That’s so much more insulting than saying like, “I don’t think you’re funny,” or “I don’t like the way you look.”

That made me nuts. I wrote this rant and I put it on my Facebook page thinking, “If someone else tweets that I don’t play, I’ll just refer them to this thing I wrote about how much I love games.” I wrote it and I posted on my Facebook page and I went to bed, and when I woke up in the morning, it was on the front page of Reddit. It was just because I feel like I was saying stuff that a lot of people felt – about people who were doubting other people’s gamer cred and how bulls*** that was. That post was literally translated into three different languages by the end of the day because people were like, “Why is it that different people who have all been excluded their whole lives are now being so s***ty and trying to keep other people out of a hobby they love?”

Where do you think that mentality comes from?
It’s strange, but it’s almost like you can’t really claim your nerd if you didn’t play alone for a substantial portion of your childhood A certain hardcore group feels like if you didn’t have a period in time where you’re like alone with your figurines then you’re not really a nerd. For me this is a group of people who, for the most part, were totally on the outside as kids and now they’ve created a club and they don’t want to let anybody else in. They are engaging in the same judgmental behavior that was used against them as kids. I don’t understand – can’t we share one thing in common that’s incredibly powerful. We all love to play video games. That should be the only requirement for getting into this club. You love video games. That’s it.

For more insight about the recording process, read our interview with Castlevania’s Robert Carlyle.